Cloud Migration Cost: What It Really Runs in 2026
A cloud migration costs $20,000 to $650,000, with most mid-market projects landing between $65,000 and $190,000 and running 3 to 6 months. A 20 VM lift and shift with no database engine change closes in 5 to 9 weeks for $20,000 to $50,000.
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A cloud migration costs $20,000 to $650,000, with most mid-market projects landing between $65,000 and $190,000 and running 3 to 6 months. A 20 VM lift and shift with no database engine change closes in 5 to 9 weeks for $20,000 to $50,000. A regulated refactor with Oracle coming off the floor takes 7 to 14 months and starts at $200,000. The gap is almost entirely workload count, database engine changes, and how much downtime you can tolerate on cutover weekend.
What a cloud migration actually costs
Across 2,000+ projects at Digital Heroes, cloud migration quotes cluster into three honest bands. The number moves on workload count and database complexity, not on how impressive the deck looks.
Tier 1: Lift and shift, $20,000 to $50,000, 5 to 9 weeks
Ten to 25 virtual machines moved as-is from a data centre or VMware cluster into AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. You get a light discovery pass, a single-account landing zone, networking and identity wired up, replication via the cloud vendor's own tooling, one cutover rehearsal, and a weekend cutover with a rollback plan. One or two engineers plus a part-time architect.
What falls out of scope at this tier, explicitly: no application refactoring, no database engine change, no zero-downtime cutover (plan for 4 to 12 hours of outage), no multi-account guardrails, no compliance evidence pack, no cost optimization pass, no disaster recovery build, no observability rebuild beyond default cloud metrics. If a vendor quotes $35,000 and any of those words appear in the proposal, the proposal is wrong.
Tier 2: Replatform, $65,000 to $190,000, 3 to 6 months
Thirty to 90 workloads, two to five databases, a handful of applications moved onto managed services instead of VMs. Multi-account landing zone written in Terraform, secrets management, a real network design with hybrid connectivity, waves of migration with rehearsals per wave, monitoring rebuilt, runbooks written, two weeks of hypercare after cutover. Team is typically an architect, two to three cloud engineers, a DBA for part of it, a QA engineer, and a project manager. This is where most companies actually land.
Tier 3: Refactor or regulated, $200,000 to $650,000, 7 to 14 months
Oracle or mainframe-adjacent systems, PCI or HIPAA scope, 100+ workloads, applications rearchitected into containers or serverless, near-zero downtime cutover, full DR with tested failover, and an auditor who will ask for evidence. Add a security engineer, a data engineer, and a compliance lead to the team. Anything past $650,000 is a portfolio programme, not a project, and should be broken into funded waves.
What actually drives the number
1. Workload count and shape ($900 to $1,600 per straightforward VM). At volume, a clean Linux or Windows VM with no exotic dependencies costs $900 to $1,600 to discover, replicate, test and cut over. The first ten cost roughly 3x that because you are building the pipeline, not moving servers. The killers are the outliers: an unsupported OS, hardcoded IP addresses, a licence-locked appliance, a service account nobody can find the password for. Budget $4,000 to $12,000 per offender, and assume 10 to 15 percent of your estate qualifies.
2. Database migration and engine change ($3,000 to $70,000 per database). Same engine to a managed equivalent, SQL Server to RDS SQL Server or Postgres to Cloud SQL, is $3,000 to $8,000 per instance. Changing engines is a rewrite, not a move. Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL or SQL Server to Aurora runs $25,000 to $70,000 per database because stored procedures, triggers and application SQL all get rewritten and then regression tested. One Oracle instance can cost more than 40 clean VMs.
3. Data volume and the cutover window (adds $15,000 to $60,000). Under 5 TB with an 8 hour window is a non-event. Over 20 TB, or a window under 4 hours, forces continuous replication, delta syncs, physical transfer appliances and two or three full rehearsals. AWS publishes DataSync at $0.0125 per GB transferred, which is small money, but the engineering time to prove a 4 hour cutover is not: expect $15,000 to $60,000 on top depending on how many systems must land together.
4. Compliance and regulated data (adds 18 to 30 percent). HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS or GDPR data residency add encryption design, key management, logging retention, access reviews, network segmentation and an evidence pack. On a $150,000 build that is $27,000 to $45,000 of real work. It cannot be bolted on at the end without redoing the landing zone.
5. Landing zone depth ($12,000 to $45,000). A single account with a default VPC costs $12,000 to stand up. Multi-account with organizational guardrails, centralized logging, transit gateway, hybrid connectivity back to your office or remaining data centre, and the whole thing in Terraform costs $35,000 to $45,000. This line item is the one cheap quotes delete, and it is the one you cannot retrofit cheaply.
6. Rehost versus replatform versus refactor ($1,200 to $60,000 per application). Rehosting an app is roughly the VM price. Replatforming it onto a managed container service is $3,500 to $9,000. Refactoring it into microservices or serverless is $18,000 to $60,000 per application. Refactoring during a migration is the single most common way a $120,000 project becomes a $400,000 one. Move first, refactor after, unless the app physically cannot run on the target.
Worked example: 40 VMs and two databases, VMware to AWS
A mid-market logistics company: 40 VMs on supported operating systems with no licence-locked appliances, six internal web applications, two SQL Server 2016 databases, 9 TB of data, SOC 2 required, 8 hour cutover window acceptable. Five months.
- Discovery, dependency mapping, TCO model: $11,000
- Landing zone: three accounts, VPC, transit gateway, IAM, guardrails, all in Terraform: $24,000
- Rehost 40 clean VMs via AWS Application Migration Service, four waves, $1,150 each: $46,000
- Replatform six web apps onto ECS Fargate, $3,500 each: $21,000
- Two SQL Server databases to RDS, same engine, $6,000 each: $12,000
- Data migration engineering, 9 TB via DataSync plus one Snowball: $7,500
- AWS transfer and appliance charges at list: $2,400
- Two cutover rehearsals plus the weekend cutover: $9,000
- Observability rebuild, CloudWatch plus agents on 40 hosts: $8,000
- SOC 2 evidence pack and security hardening: $14,000
- Runbooks, handover, two weeks hypercare: $9,000
- Project management and QA across five months: $18,000
Total: $181,900. That sits near the top of Tier 2, and the reason is one line: SOC 2. Strip compliance ($14,000) and the observability rebuild ($8,000) and the same estate lands at $159,900. Add one Oracle database coming off the floor at $25,000 to $70,000 and it lands between $206,900 and $251,900.
The ongoing costs nobody quotes
The cloud bill itself. The migration quote is not the cost of running in the cloud. For that estate, 40 compute instances, two RDS instances, storage and load balancers, expect $6,800 to $11,000 per month on-demand. AWS publishes compute Savings Plans discounts of up to 72 percent against on-demand for a three year all-upfront commitment, with one year and no-upfront terms discounted progressively less. If nobody buys commitments by month three, you are paying on-demand for a workload that is not going anywhere.
Egress. AWS publishes data transfer out to the internet at $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB per month. A reporting system that ships 4 TB a month out of the cloud is $360 a month that did not exist in your data centre. Model it before cutover, not after the first invoice.
Third party services. Datadog publishes Pro host monitoring at $15 per host per month, so 40 hosts is $600 a month. Add log management, a secrets or state backend, and an on-call tool, and $900 to $1,800 a month is normal.
Maintenance at 15 to 20 percent of build per year. On a $181,900 build that is $27,300 to $36,400 annually for patching, Terraform upkeep, alert tuning, DR tests and the small fixes that follow anything real. Vendors who skip this line are hoping you will pay it as ad hoc tickets at a worse rate.
The first year of changes. Every migration surfaces work: an app that needs autoscaling, a report that got slow, an integration that broke. Budget 25 to 40 percent of the build cost for year one changes. On this project, $45,500 to $72,800. It will get spent. Deciding that now is cheaper than discovering it in month four with no budget line.
How to not get burned on price
The cheapest quote is usually cheap because it deleted discovery. Without dependency mapping, the vendor is assuming every VM is a clean VM, and 10 to 15 percent are not. In our experience that assumption produces 20 to 35 percent cost overrun plus at least one failed cutover, and a failed cutover costs more than the discovery would have. Ask any low quote one question: which specific servers did you price, by name? If they cannot produce the list, they priced a guess.
A change request should be priced in engineering days, not adjectives. $1,400 to $2,200 per day is a fair rate for senior cloud engineering, and a change request should say "3.5 days, $6,300, here is what it touches." Anything under half a day should be absorbed without a ticket. If every question generates a change request, the original scope was written to be incomplete.
Four contract terms protect the number. First, fixed scope with a named inventory: an appendix listing every VM, database and application by hostname, with anything not listed priced separately. Second, IP assigns to you on payment, not on project completion, so a dispute does not hold your Terraform hostage. Third, source code and Terraform state live in your repository and your cloud accounts from day one, never the vendor's. Fourth, a rollback plan per wave, written and tested, with acceptance defined as "systems running and verified in the target for 72 hours," not "files copied."
How to brief a vendor so the quotes are comparable
Most quotes are not comparable because every vendor priced a different project. Send all of them the same six things and the spread collapses to something you can actually judge.
- A workload inventory export. RVTools for VMware, or the assessment export from Azure Migrate or AWS Application Discovery Service. Hostnames, CPU, RAM, disk, OS version.
- Data volume per system, and where it grows fastest.
- Maximum acceptable downtime per system, in hours, per system, not one number for everything. This one line moves the price more than any other.
- Compliance regime and audit date, if any.
- Target cloud, and whether it is decided. If it is not, say so and ask them to price the decision as a separate assessment.
- Which applications you would refactor and which you would not touch. Be blunt. Refactor appetite is the difference between $120,000 and $400,000.
Then require every vendor to price the same four phases separately: discovery, landing zone, migration waves, and cutover plus hypercare. Once the phases line up, the comparison takes ten minutes, and the vendor who is $60,000 cheaper will be visibly cheaper in exactly one phase. That is where the risk is hiding.
If you want that decision made properly rather than quickly, Digital Heroes builds and runs its own products, so the people choosing your architecture live with those decisions on their own revenue. Nothing about that commits you to the build.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- McKinsey's Developer Velocity research finds best-in-class tools are the top contributor to software business success, yet only about 5% of executives ranked tools among their top-three software enablers, signaling underinvestment in developer tools (this finding originates in McKinsey's Developer Velocity study rather than the linked generative-AI article). Source: McKinsey & Company (2023) →
- A 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed increased retail conversions by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%; travel conversions rose 10.1%. Source: Deloitte & Google (2020) →
- Bersin by Deloitte research found organizations that use HR technology and employee-centric design to build a flexible, empowering workplace are more than 5 times more effective at improving employee engagement and retention than their peers, and 2.5 times more likely to reach 'high-impact' status by leveraging HR for digital transformation. Source: Bersin by Deloitte (2017) →
- Acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, and research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95% - underscoring the ROI of support that keeps customers. Source: Harvard Business Review / Bain & Company (2014) →
Frequently asked questions
How much does a cloud migration cost?
Most cloud migrations cost $20,000 to $650,000. A 10 to 25 VM lift and shift with no database engine change runs $20,000 to $50,000 in 5 to 9 weeks. A typical mid-market project of 30 to 90 workloads with a few databases lands between $65,000 and $190,000 over 3 to 6 months, and regulated refactors start at $200,000.
Why do cloud migration quotes vary so much for the same estate?
Because vendors are pricing different projects, not the same one. The three biggest swings are database engine changes (same engine is $3,000 to $8,000 per instance, Oracle to PostgreSQL is $25,000 to $70,000), compliance scope (adds 18 to 30 percent), and cutover window (a sub-4-hour window can add $15,000 to $60,000). A quote that skipped discovery is cheap because it assumed every server is clean, and 10 to 15 percent never are.
What does $50,000 buy in a cloud migration?
Around 20 to 25 straightforward VMs rehosted as-is, a single-account landing zone with networking and identity, replication via the cloud vendor's own tooling, one cutover rehearsal and a weekend cutover with rollback. It does not buy application refactoring, database engine changes, a multi-account foundation, compliance evidence, disaster recovery, or a rebuilt monitoring stack. Expect 4 to 12 hours of planned downtime.
Can I migrate to the cloud cheaper offshore?
Yes, day rates are lower, and the failure mode is specific: offshore teams price the server count accurately and price the unknowns badly. Cloud migration cost is concentrated in discovery, dependency mapping and cutover judgment, which need people who can get your DBA and your network owner on a call. If you go offshore, keep discovery and the cutover plan with someone accountable in your timezone and hand the waves offshore.
What are the ongoing costs after a cloud migration?
Three buckets. The cloud bill itself, roughly $6,800 to $11,000 per month for a 40 instance estate on-demand, reduced by a Savings Plan or Reservation (AWS publishes compute Savings Plans discounts of up to 72 percent for a three year all-upfront commitment, less for shorter terms). Third party tooling, typically $900 to $1,800 per month, since Datadog publishes Pro host monitoring at $15 per host per month. And maintenance at 15 to 20 percent of the build per year, so $27,300 to $36,400 on a $181,900 build.
How long does a cloud migration take?
Five to nine weeks for a small lift and shift of 10 to 25 VMs. Three to six months for 30 to 90 workloads with databases and a proper landing zone. Seven to 14 months for regulated environments, 100+ workloads, or anything with Oracle or application refactoring in scope. Discovery alone is 2 to 4 weeks and is not the place to save time.
Should I refactor applications during the migration?
Almost never. Refactoring an application into containers or serverless costs $18,000 to $60,000 per app versus roughly $1,200 to $9,000 to rehost or replatform it. Refactoring mid-migration is the most common reason a $120,000 project becomes a $400,000 one, because you are debugging new architecture and a new environment at the same time. Move first, refactor after, unless the app physically cannot run on the target.
What should a change request cost during a cloud migration?
It should be priced in engineering days at $1,400 to $2,200 per day for senior cloud engineering, stated as something like 3.5 days, $6,300, with a list of what it touches. Anything under half a day should be absorbed without paperwork. If every question you ask produces a change request, the original scope was deliberately written to be incomplete.
What contract terms protect the price of a cloud migration?
Four. Fixed scope backed by a named inventory appendix listing every VM, database and application by hostname, with anything unlisted priced separately. IP assigning to you on payment rather than on project completion. Source code, Terraform and state living in your repository and your cloud accounts from day one. And a tested rollback plan per wave, with acceptance defined as systems verified running in the target for 72 hours.
How much should a small business expect to pay for custom software?
Across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects, a small business system that replaces spreadsheets or one core workflow typically lands between $40,000 and $80,000, with more complex first versions running up to $150,000. The two levers that move the number most are integrations and user roles, not the team's hourly rate. Any quote under $15,000 for a full production system means the vendor has not understood your scope yet.
How many people should be working on my software project?
A typical $40,000 to $150,000 build runs on three to five people: a technical lead, one or two developers, a designer, and someone owning QA and project communication, often as overlapping part-time roles. More bodies do not make software arrive faster; past a point they slow it down with coordination overhead. The question that matters more than headcount is whether one named senior engineer is accountable for the outcome.
Our developer disappeared mid-project. Can another team pick up the code?
Yes, this is a routine engagement, provided the code exists somewhere you can access, so your first move is securing the repository, hosting, and domain credentials today. A takeover starts with a one to two week paid code audit that ends in one of three verdicts: continue the build, keep the design but rebuild the weak parts, or start over. Digital Heroes has inherited enough projects to say plainly that sometimes the rebuild is cheaper than the rescue, and an honest agency will tell you which one you have before taking your money.
Couldn't I just build my app in Bubble or another no-code tool instead of hiring an agency?
For validating an idea with real users, yes, and we tell clients that honestly. The walls come later: Bubble apps cannot be exported as code to run anywhere else, performance drops on complex data operations, and usage-based pricing climbs as you grow. A meaningful share of Digital Heroes custom builds are rebuilds of no-code MVPs that proved the business worked, which is the system operating as intended: validate cheap, then build the version that scales.
How do I calculate whether custom software will pay for itself?
Divide the build cost by the monthly benefit, where benefit is hours saved times loaded hourly cost, plus subscription fees replaced, plus any revenue the software unlocks. Three staff saving 10 hours a week each at a $40 loaded rate is about $62,000 a year, which pays back a $60,000 build in roughly 12 months. Across Digital Heroes internal-tool projects, 12 to 24 months is the normal payback range, and anything projecting under 6 months usually means the spreadsheet is hiding costs.
Will custom software work with the tools we already use, like QuickBooks and Stripe?
Yes, and this is one of custom software's genuine advantages: QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and most mainstream business tools publish documented APIs built for exactly this. Expect each standard integration to add one to two weeks of build time, and be suspicious of any quote that lists five integrations without asking what data flows in which direction. The hard cases are legacy systems with no API, which is a question to raise in discovery, not in week nine.
Should I ask for a fixed price or pay the agency hourly?
Fixed price for the first version, hourly or retainer for what comes after launch. A fixed-scope, fixed-price V1 puts the estimation risk on the agency, which is exactly where you want it while trust is unproven; hourly billing on an unscoped greenfield build is a blank check. After launch, flip it, because maintenance and small features arrive unpredictably and fixed-pricing every ticket wastes everyone's time.
How do we get years of data out of our old system and into the new one?
Treat migration as a planned sub-project: a field-mapping document, at least one dry run on a copy of your data, then a cutover with the old system kept read-only for 30 days as a safety net. On Digital Heroes projects it consumes 10 to 15% of the budget when the old system has an export, and more when data must be pulled out screen by screen. Ask any vendor to walk you through their last migration before you sign.
How long does it take from first call to software my team can actually use?
Plan for four to six months: two to three weeks of discovery, two to four weeks of design, then a 10 to 16 week build with testing. In Digital Heroes delivery experience the schedule killer is not engineering speed but decision lag; a client who takes two weeks to approve wireframes adds two weeks to launch. Book a weekly 30-minute decision slot before kickoff and most of that risk disappears.
Who can build a custom software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
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